July 2015 Summaries

At the invitation of Eva Adler and Norman Shamas, I gave a workshop on CartoDB's real-time mapping capabilities for the TechChange class `Mapping for Social Good`. I introduced the idea of using sync tables to create maps that update hourly with earthquake data pulled from the United States Geological Survey servers. Using PostGIS, I showed how to join earthquake dataset points with Nepal districts polygons to produce a map visualizing the largest intersecting earthquake in each district. This can be achieved by simply pasting custom SQL into the CartoDB Editor's SQL tray, which will run against tables to produce an up-to-date map every time it is viewed. The TechChange class offers additional training opportunities for learning next-generation skills such as mapping real-time data.

PlaceSpeak is a Vancouver-based company that has taken cities and civic participation to new heights across the world, using technology to enable evidence-based decision making and empower citizens. CartoDB collaborated with PlaceSpeak to create a beautiful user growth map, leveraging both companies' expertise in GIS technology and civic data. The partnership aims to foster meaningful collaboration between business and civic innovation, encouraging civic engagement and transparency. By combining their strengths, the two companies are driving civic co-creation and exploring future collaborations that will further enhance public consultation and community participation.

The new One-Click Mapping functionality in CartoDB allows users to quickly and easily visualize their uploaded datasets by suggesting ready-made maps based on basic rules of thumb for data visualization. The platform analyzes the columns in the dataset to identify the best-suited map, taking into account factors such as timestamp columns, sparse values, and numerical data distribution. With just one click, users can access pre-styled maps that remain fully editable, saving time and effort in the initial design process.

Finding the Nearest Neighbor queries are commonly used in apps with maps, where users want to find relevant data based on their location. These queries can be answered using SQL and the CartoDB SQL API, allowing developers to easily send requests to a database for the necessary data. The map window defines a box or radius around a query point, and queries can be built to find things within this defined area. For example, "Find me all the restaurants within 1km of my current location" or "Find me the closest gas stations to my current location". The CartoDB SQL API provides functions such as ST_Intersects, ST_DWithin, and ST_Transform to perform these queries, including distance calculations that take into account the Mercator projection. These queries can be used to find things nearest to a query point or within a radius, allowing developers to build powerful and location-based applications.

This project aims to capture the urban smellscape through digital data, celebrating the positive role that smell plays in city life. By collecting smell-related words from literature and crawling pictures tagged with those terms from Creative Commons Flickr photos, Rossano Schifanella was able to automatically detect semantically coherent smell categories and map the smellscape of entire cities using CartoDB. The resulting maps show characteristic smells at a street segment level, highlighting the most common smell categories in each area. By sharing his results with a broad audience through interactive and visually appealing maps, Rossano aims to disseminate his findings on the importance of smell in urban planning.

Let your labels shine! A few months ago we announced our brand new free basemaps—Positron and Dark Matter—built with OpenStreetMap data and designed with the help of our friends at Stamen; your data will absolutely pop when using them. In the process of building Positron and Dark Matter we worked to ensure that layers could be entirely hidden from basemaps or just used separately both of which can be very effective for specific uses like visualizing OSM data overlaying cartography features over satellite imagery or labeling the world in a completely different way. We are now introducing a new feature that takes advantage of these new layers to make your maps shine even more than usual. Starting today all CARTO maps using Positron Dark Matter or Stamen Toner basemaps will have the possibility to overlay the labels layer on top of the data layer. Now you can add more spatial context to your maps. We have decided to make this new "sandwich" the default option but in case you'd prefer to use the regular or light versions of the basemaps you can still choose them in the basemap selector. We know that rendering labels on top of other layers won’t work in certain situations and that’s why you'll still have the option to render labels under your data layers. Although the related documentation is already published in the upcoming days we will also explain how all this can be used in cartodb.js and how you can benefit from it by building awesome spatial apps. We hope you enjoy this new addition and look forward to hearing your feedback about it.

CartoDB has formed a partnership with Code For America, a leading organization dedicated to building open source technology and organizing passionate people to make government services simple, effective, and easy to use. This collaboration aims to empower communities through mapping and data for civic prosperity and growth. The CartoDB team is excited to sponsor the upcoming Code For America Summit in Oakland, California, bringing together hundreds of governments and civic-minded individuals. Additionally, they have been engaging with Code For America fellows and brigades from across the US, exploring ideas and innovations that can drive positive change.